Subbers Without Mod are Not Allowed Anymore?

Contributing
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I’ve got native-fluency in both English and Macedonian and I’ve also got a Bachelor’s Degree in English Language Teaching and English-Macedonian (and vice versa!) translation. I’ve also got professional experience in editing due to my degree. I’m new to Viki, because I wanted to volunteer in my free time, but it’s proven difficult exactly because of this. I’ve been watching on Viki for a while and I noticed that my mother tongue, Macedonian, wasn’t on any of the dramas I’ve seen so far. So, I decided to make an account and volunteer, seeing as I know a ton of people in my country who’d love to watch, but would like the subs to be in Macedonian. I just wanted to make these dramas even more available.

Anyway, I volunteered for a couple of projects through the Project Finder, but I was told “We don’t have a mod for your language, sorry.” or I just didn’t get a reply at all. We’re a small country and as far as I’ve seen, there’s no one else that wants to volunteer in Macedonian. I would happily also volunteer to be a mod and mod myself and any other people if they turn up in the future. However, I cannot volunteer to be a Macedonian mod, seeing as I need to have 3000+ subtitles to qualify for the position. Also, I cannot get those 3000+ subtitles if I’m not allowed to subtitle because there isn’t a Macedonian mod already.

@vikicommunity Is there anything you can do about this?

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To all CMs: time to boycott the new rule from Viki in case of new subbers in smaller languages.

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Write me a mail. You can translate in one of my channels.

Since Viki does not follow his own rules and uses people as CM who have been reported before because they violate the 5 slot rule. Viki also doesn’t respond to my request regarding subbers who don’t have 3000 subtitles yet and belong to a small community, I also don’t need to follow rules that haven’t been officially announced yet.

And a note to abusers, should you sneak into my channels in this way, I will remove you.

Alex :e-mail:

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For a variety of reasons, I have not been keeping up with Viki subbing weirdness for a while. At the moment, life in my part of the Viki-verse is pretty strange all by itself (see end of message).*

Every time I step away from the Viki community and come back, someone “in authority” (with whom subbers and seggers never have direct communication) seems to have made an executive decision without consulting anyone who actually does the work that enables Viki to compete with other “Asianese” streaming platforms.

I thought Viki was a part of Rakuten, not Samsung, but maybe there’s some financial deal between those two “money sources” that the Viki Community doesn’t know about.

Sub-paragraph five million under article three gazillion of a twelve billion page secret agreement: “Viki subbers and seggers may be ignored, overworked, underappreciated, discounted, ridiculed, confused, and otherwise mentally and emotionally messed with by any and everyone at any time for any reason.”

I am very close to getting enough subs done for After School Club to boot me to the next level, but there are days I think, “If I miss my deadline and have to pay to watch Viki, I’m not going to be the ultimate loser, Viki is.”

(And then I watch dramas such as She and Her Perfect Husband or It’s Beautiful Now . . . and I just fall in love all over again with the purity and devotion that shines out of the Viki community on behalf of Asian dramas.)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

*The latest strangeness in my life: I have a friend who is ethnic Chinese who is about fifteen years younger than I am; she went to med school and her husband got a PhD at the university where I went to grad school; she was at the Lunar New Year celebration in Monterrey Park, CA where an elderly Vietnamese man opened fire. She had just left the area where the poor, deranged man started shooting, and she posted fairly quickly on Facebook that she was okay.

I have no idea who in the Viki community might have been there or had family members at that celebration, but that was very sad. I am glad that no politician of any kind has dared to use that horrible incident to gain some kind of advantage over others.

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I’ve created a new topic listing the channels for which I have access which don’t require a pass for new subbers. https://www.viki.com/tv/1205c-sungkyunkwan-scandal
K channels not requiring any pass to subtitle

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Thanks so much! I really appreciate it. I just sent you a message. I’m looking forward to translating for you. :smile:

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Hello everyone,

Thank you very much for your patience! Also, thank you very much for addressing your concerns to us.

These are some of the burning questions a few of you had:

1. added the subbers without mods as editors

  • Subbers (contributors) who will not be editing, should not be added as an editor. The editor role is only for users that will be editing, not creating the initial subtitles. Hence, if a contributor is only a subber, there is no need for them to be added as an editor. They should be self-editing (double-checking) their own work as a subber.

2. subbers, who do not want to be mod and don’t have any mod available in their language not being able to contribute, even they might be able to subtitle a lot on their own, not necessarily in bad quality either, wouldn’t have any chance now if this is the case.

  • Without language moderators on the channel, there is no one to direct the subtitlers and ensure that the parts are being divided up fairly. There is also no one with a minimum amount of experience to assist in ensuring the quality of subtitles are good. A friendly reminder: You do not have to be a moderator to contribute subtitles, you potentially will not get to decide what parts/sections you get to subtitle.

3. imagine you added subtitlers a while ago, and they finished the project, but are still not having enough contributions to become moderator (it was rather short). Do I have to remove them? Find a moderator who pretended to moderate?

  • The subtitlers should be allowed to stay on the channel if needed. They were added to the channel already. If the subtitlers want to be removed, they can request this from the language moderator and/or channel manager.

4. On my very first drama, I had a Greek friend to add as a first time Greek subber. There were no Greek Mods interested in the drama. She subbed the whole drama and quickly earned QC status. Now she takes others under her guidance and helps them get started on Viki. If she entered Viki now, and wasn’t allowed to start, we would have missed a great treasure!**
Viki expects us to police the abusers and not allow them on our shows. When Viki gets enough complaints about someone, they remove the person. Then give us some freedom with non-abusers.
**If someone is good and does the job well, I think we should be allowed freedom to use such a person. Otherwise, how will s/he ever get 10,000 credits to become a Language Moderator? Even our established Mods cannot accept the many shows which load every week! So how can they also supervise rookies who are willing to work on unpopular dramas?

  • We agree. If someone is good and does the job well, they should be allowed to contribute. A new user in the Spanish and Portuguese should be able to utilize the Sample Videos to display their language proficiency. It is also recommended that the discussion forum is used to find other community members who contribute in your language as well as finding channels that have subs in your language.

Here is a scenario for example: A newer contributor could say that they know language xyz which there isn’t a moderator for. They ask the CM to add them as a subtitler to the team. The new user contributes subtitles in the language xyz to the channel. This new user does this for another channel or two until they reach QC status.

Months later, this user is reported for bad subtitles which are on multiple channels. Giving this user the chance to subtitle without someone to validate their proficiency means we now have bad quality subtitles on Viki, a user earned QC benefits for these bad subtitles, and we have to then remove all of these subtitles and take action against this user. Contributors who truly are having trouble finding others in the community to moderate their languages can reach out to the staff. Please note that this should be for languages (language communities) that are newer (on Viki).

5. Hi, wasn’t it 3000 subs to become a mod? did they change that as well?

  • For more details on all roles, please feel free to take a look at our role guide.

Finally, we would like to add that if the moderator role of any language is not filled as a team role, the position should be considered open. No contributor should be asked to be co-moderator or told that another contributor is the specific language moderator when that other contributor is listed as an Editor/All Language Moderator and NOT as the specific Language moderator, if this happens the contributor requesting to be added can report the Channel Manager to us via the Viki Help Center.

As Channel Managers of teams, you have to assign yourself in positions on the team that you want to participate in. Example: As a CM, I have to add myself as a Greek Moderator & Greek Subtitler if I plan to hold these positions and participate in these roles.

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Thank you for the reply and the explanation. I’ll save this for future reference.

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How does that help all the (potential) contributors who are NOT Spanish or Portuguese?

And Viki can provide staff moderators for every single language out there? :thinking:

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For the ‘adding subbers without mods’, there is a solution. Because there are so many rare languages which stop these kind contributors, who are trying to help the community and to reach QCs for the moderator role, I have a few suggestions.

I reckon the 3 best ways to solve this problem is either:

Extend the moderation slots for QCs and Gold QCs for uncommon languages (on Viki) such as Bhojpuri, Macedonia, Vietnamese etc… Definitely not Spanish or Portuguese because there are a lot of moderators in those languages.

Or the 2nd way is just to allow Newbies and QC Trainee subbers to work on their own. (like the old way)

Last but not least, we can have a system to detect if a person/account is trusted or not when they apply for the show/drama on Project Finder, and only CM/or Mods can see it (to prevent conflicts). It might be called something like Trust Status or something like that (it can be the trust level: trusted, unsure/no record and not trusted/not trustable). This way is harder and more complicated than the other 2 ideas.

In my opinion, idea 1 and idea 3 are the best and more likely to work. Even known idea 3 sounds okay, but I would recommend idea 1 as it’s easier to be done. However, everything has pros and cons, it just depends on which one will have more pros and less cons. I hope to see some improvements about this in the near future. Hopefully Viki will use my suggestions. Really looking forward to see how Viki will deal with this.

Edit: Removed French off the uncommon language on Viki.

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I think they need to concentrate more on solving issues with OL volunteers because it will only be the fair thing to do. They always seem to be two steps behind. It seems like they’re giving the SPANISH and PORTUGUESE teams total control in here, and that’s one mistake they will end up regretting in the future. Mark my words.

mirjam_465
And Viki can provide staff moderators for every single language out there?

It’s doable. they just need to work things out, and be willing to appreciate all the OL volunteers willing to work here for free; by offering a variety of different language in their dramas/movies/shows etc. The benefit will be that it will attract more OL paying subscribers.

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I would not call French a rare language (even on viki). The other examples are all languages in which we either never had a moderator or they left a long time ago. If the only ones left are not qualified to be a moderator, it won’t help.
Now, it might work for the small but not extremely rare (on Viki) languages, but it would still mean that moderators who already have to do a lot more than just moderate because their teams are small would have to do even more and it would take even longer.

I think this is the best option of the three, even though it involves the risk of abuse.

How would this trust status even be determined? Having people judge each other could result in foul play and even in the best case, it’s subjective. Plus, who would judge the rare languages?

It would be a big investment. We’ve had several rare-language volunteers come and go over the years and it never seemed to bring that many new paying viewers.
In fact, Viki seems to be coming back from their original wish of including all languages and only focus on the big ones now. We have movies that can only be translated into 2 or 3 languages, the sample videos are exclusively for 2 languages, and if you happen to live in South Korea, you can’t even watch Viki anymore.
Paid staff is more and more taking over. If they can afford so many paid subbers/editors/moderators/segmenters, then why were we never paid? And how long is it going to take until they don’t need us anymore?

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Yeah, I agree it can be costly for them, but I was hoping they could use some of their paid subbers (but that was just an idea). Reality is, they will do whatever they want to do, and we have no saying in that department.

Honestly, they never ever needed us. Most of us, needed them for different reasons. Maybe, if we didn’t had so many ppl. here hogging positions, and doing things; like allowing an abuser have access to dramas, but an honest person not being able to do volunteer work here. If only they had been fair and honest, and stop affecting the Quality work at this site for their own selfish reasons, we would never have gotten to this point.
In a way, it’s their loss too, if they don’t see the ones worth holding on too, and the rotten apple ones, they STILL need to let go.

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I argree with your other points, however, like I said, “a system to detect” which I mean like an AI, Viki Staff or CM/maybe mods job, not just everyone because that will be unfair.

[Add-on] This system will show CM/Mods when this user apply for a drama/show on Project Finder. This will require a number of people to rate if this user is strusted, they need to have enough evidence to show if this user is qualify enough for correct status (more upvotes will make this user trusted, in case if this user is in between, they will be unsure, just like the voting the shows/dramas on Viki, and not just base on 1 or 2 people rating). (more complicated)
It basically like a thing to tell CM/Mods how well that user did in their last projects (my aim) (easier way/second way if they choose to do this system). But to do any of these way, there’s a lot of coding to be done.

(in either way, only Viki Staff, CM/Mods can vote, so I think it’s fair. Users can see their rates, but like overall rate, it must not show who rated)

To be honest, I think the second way will more likely to work.

Sorry I didn’t explain in detail. Really apologize

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Your system would be there first and foremost for the rare languages, right? So for the languages that have little or no existing contributors. Then who is going to judge the newcomers in that language?
AI - I should hope not…
Staff - They speak English, a few Asian languages, Spanish, and Portuguese from what I recall, but certainly not all languages we have here, let alone those we don’t have yet.
CMs - They are volunteers like the rest of us. You can’t expect them to speak all languages.
Moderators - If we have moderators for said language, then we don’t need a system to determine if new people can work on their own. But for the rare languages, no one will be available.
And who would upvote those working in rare languages? They are either completely on their own or there is only a handful of other speakers.
In any case, it will never be fair. Not only because not everyone likes each other, but also because being an established moderator is in no way a guarantee that someone is really good at a language. After all, the means to become a moderator is to deliver contributions. Those contributions give you QC status, regardless of their quality. And the less speakers we have of a language, the less control there will be.

That is how it used to be. I guess it all comes down to what Viki finds more important: keeping abusers out at all cost or giving newcomers a chance?

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The system is just for rating their activeness, contributions and responsibility (for CM). But their subtitling skills? Who knows. Maybe just let them in like before? Well, in this case, we can’t. But if they join a channel with a moderator in their language, then this subtitle rating would work. (that’s why we should have different things to rate someone). Without a OL mod, only CMs can rate based on their activeness, contributions and responsibility, not subtitling skills. Although, it may not work with everyone, but it can help some. Better than nothing.

Like I said, there’re pros and cons. There can’t be a perfect solution, but the most suitable solution will be chosen.

If there’s no solution, Viki gotta decide to focus on only one or at least one at a time.
I honestly want the old system back. It gives newcomers a chance and also helps the community.

Just a little back story, I was a newbie on Viki, having no project. It was really hard to find a project even I had some experience with subtitling before (on other websites). It took a while for a channel to accept me as my language is an uncommon language on Viki. Now that I think back, I’m feeling lucky because if I just start it now, I would never have a chance because of this new rule. So I’m always looking for anyone who speaks my language and wanting to become a subtitler. (just like I thought, my language is uncommon and I still can’t find an active subtitler for my language. All the volunteers are no longer active or wanting to sub. I guess I’m late :cry:)

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Have you ever considered joining the English teams? So far, we have only 1 TE (translation editor) for Vietnamese, @trangstar888 trangstar888 - Rakuten Viki

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Sorry if I ask a stupid question, but how can I be in the English team? How can I become one?And what does it do? Sorry, I’m still quite new to Viki. I only know/fluent English and Vietnamese, so can I become one?

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Isn’t it for people to sub another language to English?

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You can, but preferably under guidance of experienced editors.
The English teams used to consist of:

  • English subbers
  • TE (translation editor)
  • GE (general editor)
  • CE (chief editor)

Nowadays almost all shows are presubbed so we usually don’t need English subbers anymore, but we still have those 3 editors. The TE is the one who checks if the translation from the Asian language (Vietnamese in your case) to English is correct. The other editors take care of formatting, correct English, and overal consistency so the TE only focuses on the meaning.

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